HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS

Silberschict

Published by Hatje Cantz.Text by Hilar Stadler.

In the mid-1990s, Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia, who was born in 1953, set out with his camera to explore the Engadin valley, where he grew up. He discovered a primitive highland region in which nature developed unhindered. He went on to visit the plains of northern Finland and Norway, where, between the Arctic Circle and the Barents Sea, he found undisturbed wastelands. During his recent travels to the Bolivian Altiplano and to the Atacama Desert in Chile, Baselgia took a deeper delve into extreme landscape. Light is the dominant theme in Silberschict, a collection which, alongside previous publications Hochland and Weltraum, forms the final section of a breathtaking trilogy. The themes that formed the basis of Guido Baselgia’s work 10 years ago are explored with new depth in this masterful work.

Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers.Edited by Matthias Haldemann.

Guido Baselgia's Weltraum--Outerspace--is the product of several years of exploration in northern Finland and Norway, in the region between the Arctic Circle and the Barents Sea. Prehistory and the present come together across space and time in this still and inhospitable moraine landscape: is it nature before the arrival of mankind or after? Baselgia seeks to deconstruct the long-standing conventions of traditional landscape depiction with an abstract, elementary visual language--photography returned to its most elementary foundations, to a point zero. In a certain sense, his is an answer to the prevailing flood of visual images: How does one find a relevant image? Thus the view of a barren, essentially "empty" world imbued through photography with mystery and multiple meaning is transformed into that answer.

Hochland

Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers.Essays by Peter Pfrunder and Beat Stutzer.

For the past several years, Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has been occupied with a large scale project on the landscape and life in his native Engadine, a mountain valley in his native Switzerland. The resulting images are both fascinating and unsettling, portraying the apparently familiar landscape in a strikingly unfamiliar manner.